Tarot‟S Fascination with Egypt Helen S
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by The University of Sydney: Sydney eScholarship Journals online Out of Africa: Tarot‟s Fascination With Egypt Helen S. Farley Introduction Mention „tarot‟ and images of an exotic and mysterious gypsy fortune-teller spring unbidden to consciousness. Dark eyes flashing, she reveals the trumps one at a time, each a strange portent, preternaturally speaking of life, love, loss, and death. The gypsies, themselves enigmatic and of uncertain origin, were allegedly charged with carrying the tarot deck from a doomed Egyptian priesthood with the forethought to encode their most esoteric secrets in a game, a seemingly harmless pastime. How often have we heard that tarot‟s difficult birth occurred in an Egypt ancient and mystical? And though tarot scholars have known about the real origins of the deck in the Renaissance court of a northern Italian city for some two hundred years, still that link with Egypt remains obdurate. This beguiling myth, never convincingly verified by its perpetrators, began in the desire for pseudo-legitimacy through an ancient – though false – lineage and the dogged persistence of a pre-Rosetta infatuation with all things Egyptian. This article explores the origins of this persistent belief. Egyptomania in France By the beginning of the nineteenth century, all of France was enraptured with the exploits of their new leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. He had secured victory for France across Western Europe and had consolidated French power in Egypt. In the true spirit of the Enlightenment, Napoleon had taken a bevy of scientists and archaeologists with him to this ancient land and they ensured a steady stream of Egyptian artefacts and information about the distant locale travelled back to France.1 Occultists were quick to incorporate Egyptian lore into their schemes. There was a common belief that the land of the Nile was the Helen S. Farley is Mission Leader (Mobility) at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland. A version of this article will also appear as „Tarot and Egyptomania‟, in Tarot in Culture, ed. Emily Auger (Melbourne: ATS, 2011) [forthcoming]. 1 John David Wortham, British Egyptology: 1549-1906 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), p. 49. Literature & Aesthetics 21 (1) June 2011, page 175 Out of Africa stronghold of Hermetic wisdom.2 The French fascination with all things Nilotic fuelled their obsession with hieroglyphics, at that time still untranslated. Investigators laboured under the belief that these intriguing inscriptions concealed ancient magical knowledge.3 Horapollo‟s Hieroglyphica was a major source of inspiration for these occultists even though the work had long been shown to have little basis in fact.4 Jean-François Champollion‟s translation of the Rosetta Stone in 18225 enabled the translation of hieroglyphics, but occultists were slow to accept that, for the most part, they did not spell out great wisdom. Even so, occultists still believed that alchemy was born in an Egypt masked in antiquity;6 their Egyptomania fanned by Abbé Jean Terrason‟s successful novel, Sethos, written in 1731.7 This allure also explained the French occultists‟ fascination with the Corpus Hermeticum. It had been written by Greek writers who believed that Egypt was the repository of a pristine philosophy and powerful magic.8 When these documents were rediscovered and translated during the Renaissance, the aspiring magi of the period took them literally and assumed they were works of an ancient Egyptian provenance.9 It was not until 1614, when classical scholar Isaac Casaubon was unsettled by the idea that pagans had predicted the coming of Christ, that doubt was cast on the authenticity of the Hermetic texts.10 The discovery of this deception was widely recognised, especially by the 2 James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 225. 3 Charles Dempsey, „Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies and Gentile Bellini‟s Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria‟, in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, eds Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington: Folger Books, 1988), p. 343. 4 Liselotte Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics: The History of a Literary Symbol (St Louis: Washington University Press, 1970), pp. 26-27. 5 Rosalie David, The Experience of Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 72. 6 Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics, p. 228. 7 Wortham, British Egyptology, p. 47. 8 David S. Katz, The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), p. 23. 9 Wouter Hanegraaff, „The Study of Western Esotericism: New Approaches to Christian and Secular Culture‟, in New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Regional, Critical, and Historical Approaches, eds Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and Randi R. Warne (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 492-493. 10 Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen, and William D. Wharton, The Way of Hermes: The Corpus Hermeticum (London: Duckworth, 1999) p. 82. Literature & Aesthetics 21 (1) June 2011, page 176 Out of Africa Protestants,11 but in largely Catholic France the enthusiasm for the texts remained unabated. Freemasonry, itself enormously popular in Napoleonic France, also incorporated the rampant Egyptomania of the time. C. Friedrich von Köppen (1734-1797) and Johann Wilhelm Bernhard von Hymmen (1725-1786) anonymously published the Crata Repoa (1778), which told of a fictitious initiation into the Egyptian mysteries consisting of seven rites enacted in crypts, caves and secret chambers.12 Freemasons had apparently been the heirs of the geometrical skills of the ancient masters who had inherited their learning from Hermes Trismegistus.13 In 1784, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743- 1795) revealed his Egyptian rite, a Masonic order formulated by the count.14 Visitors to his „Temple of Isis‟ in Paris were greeted by a servant dressed as an Egyptian and ushered into the séance conducted by „le Grand Copht‟ Cagliostro.15 It was into this intellectually cluttered milieu that esoteric tarot first made its appearance. The game of tarot was very popular across Europe and was played throughout France in the seventeenth century, but by 1700 the game was completely unknown in Paris, being played only in the eastern parts of the country such as Alsace, Burgundy, Franche-Comté, and Provençe.16 For the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Paris, the Renaissance imagery of the tarot trumps appeared especially exotic.17 It was almost inevitable that the mysterious card game, its symbolism denied its original relevance once removed from its Renaissance context, should appear to contain promises of forgotten esoteric lore when rediscovered by a people primed to discern such knowledge in every object, sacred or mundane. The first to make this 11 Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. l. 12 Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of Occult Tarot (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 1996), p. 20. 13 Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 12. 14 Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 80. 15 Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards, p. 21. 16 Michael Dummett and John McLeod, A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs, vol. 1 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), p. 39. 17 Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards, p. xi. Literature & Aesthetics 21 (1) June 2011, page 177 Out of Africa connection between archaic wisdom and the tarot was Antoine Court de Gébelin. A French Freemason, protestant clergyman and esotericist, Court de Gébelin first made this connection just prior to the French Revolution.18 He was well-versed in all of the esoteric currents that permeated French culture at that time including Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, Kabbalism, the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg and esoteric Freemasonry. In addition, Basil Rákóczi claimed that Court de Gébelin was also an initiate of the Martinists and that he had been taught about the Book of Thoth – a legendary, lost corpus of magical lore from Egypt – by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin himself.19 Between 1773 and 1782, Court de Gébelin published his nine-volume opus entitled Le Monde Primitif Analysé et Comparé avec le Monde Moderne of which the eighth volume was in part devoted to the origins of tarot.20 Here Court de Gébelin reported that some time in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, he had come across some ladies playing the game of tarot. In Paris these cards were unusual, and he had not seen them since he was a boy. He was intrigued by the Hermetic mysteries of ancient Egypt and it occurred to him that he was seeing a sacred Egyptian book,21 perhaps even the remnants of the Book of Thoth. The trump cards he regarded as a disguised assemblage of ancient Egyptian religious doctrines. For example, he identified the Popess as „the High Priestess‟, the Chariot as „Osiris Triumphant‟, and the Star as „Sirius‟ or „the Dog Star‟.22 This Book of Thoth he supposed, must have been brought to Europe by the gypsies, who had been safeguarding it since it had been entrusted to them by Egyptian priests millennia ago. He deduced that the safest way to preserve their ancient wisdom must have been to encode it as a game and to trust that someday an adept would be able to decipher it. This honour he 18 Giordano Berti, „Il Libro Di Thot, Ovvero, L‟interpretazione Esoterica Del Tarocco‟, in I Tarocchi: Le Carte Di Corte: Bioco E Magia Alla Corte Degli Estensi, eds Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1987), p.